Power aware parallel 3-D finite element mesh refinement performance modeling and analysis with CUDA/MPI on GPU and multi-core architecture

Software power performance tuning handles the critical design constraints of software running on hardware platforms composed of large numbers of power-hungry components. The power dissipation of a Single Program/Instruction Multiple Data (SPMD/SIMD) computation such as finite element method (FEM) mesh refinement is highly dependent on the underlying algorithm and the power-consuming features of hardware Processing Elements (PE). This contribution presents a practical methodology for modeling and analyzing the power performance of parallel 3-D FEM mesh refinement on CUDA/MPI architecture based on detailed software prototypes and power parameters in order to predict the power functionality and runtime behavior of the algorithm, optimize the program design and thus achieve the best power efficiency. In detail, we have proposed approaches for GPU parallelization, dynamic CPU frequency scaling and dynamic load scheduling among PEs. The performance improvement of our designs has been demonstrated and the results have been validated on a real multi-core and GPU cluster